Sexual Harassment Does Not Exist in Poland?

by Madeline Hung, Magda Miśkowicz and Hanna Pieńczykowska

Many people in Poland think that sexual harassment in the workplace is only physical and therefore, infrequent. When we told them about the scope of behaviors defined as sexual harassment, as well as the number of people who experience it in the workplace, they were surprised. We hope that our message and our campaign will begin to change this kind of thinking, one small step at a time.

The recent media scandal concerning prominent journalist, Kamil Durczok,  shows us that there is a certain disagreement over the definition of sexual harassment in Poland: on the one hand, the victim in this case had a broad understanding of what defines sexual harassment, but on the other, she was afraid to speak up about her experience. It is likely that this victim feared public backlash about her story, as many people do not consider unwelcomed verbal remarks and advances to be sexual harassment. Individuals are not the only ones to hold this view. Many companies do not recognize the verbal forms of sexual harassment, just as Polish law provides inadequate protection against many forms of sexual harassment in the workplace.

The central idea of our campaign was to address this misunderstanding and inform people that physical, verbal and even non-verbal activities may act as sexual harassment if they are unwanted by the victim. Early on, our team decided that developing a campaign to advise victims to report their experiences would be very challenging. Considering the timeline of the campaign as well as the resources available to us, we decided that it would be inappropriate to encourage victims to report if we could not be sure that they would not face negative repercussions without adequate support. For these reasons, our team decided to focus on raising awareness about the various forms of sexual harassment and to show that not only victim, but also bystanders, and coworkers can – and should -  react.

From here, our strategy with our graphics was to show how acts of sexual harassment have become a normal thing—one of many tasks in the office during the day. We then coupled images of “normalized” sexual harassment acts with disturbing questions such as, “What’s wrong with this agenda?” Similarly, our campaign videos showed exaggerated and funny reactions to instances of sexual harassment, forcing viewers to rethink how they react in these situations– and if they react at all.

The first challenge we had in presenting this content was to address our audience’s presumption that we were only going to present female victims and male perpetrators. With any activism work, we always have to face some critique regarding the choice of the issues we want to address, even before we present the whole idea! While we had developed content featuring a variety of victim-perpetrator pairings, we had to release this content over the course of several stages/days, therefore leaving us vulnerable to critique. This goes to show, once again, that you cannot plan everything in advance because there will always be audience responses you just have to react to.

The second challenge was engaging our Facebook users. Although we managed to get almost 300 likes in a week, our followers did little beyond clicking the like button. We received very few comments, and almost no one shared their workplace experience. That is why we came up with the idea of an offline event on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. Here, we interviewed young people about their workplace cultures and asked if there was anything that these individuals wanted to “take off their agendas.” This event was very exciting for us because people finally expressed interest in the campaign and some of them shared their personal experiences. However, this event also confirmed that a social campaign extending the meaning of sexual harassment is needed in Polish society. Some of our interlocutors admitted that they have to listen to many rude remarks of sexual
nature in their offices, but had not considered that such acts might be sexual harassment.
Ultimately, we haven’t changed the world yet, at least as of presentation day, but we hope that at least some people who stumble upon our videos or pictures in the future will think twice: is sexual harassment really what I think it is, and who defines it? Do I react by helping the victim or maybe just reproduce the misunderstanding that sexual harassment is only physical? Do I care about my workplace culture? Maybe I don’t give a shit about it at all.

Do you care?

The blog entry refers to social campaign “Wykreśl z grafiku. Take It off the Agenda.” Developed by Madeline Hung, Magda Miśkowicz and Hanna Pieńczykowska.
www.wykreslzgrafiku.org
www.facebook.com/wykreslzgrafiku